InsaneJournal

As she had done so many times before, Homura reached for the gear on her shield, and there was a snap and a rushing of sand, and the world around her melted away. The whipping winds, that had caught her hair and thrown it back and forth across her face, persisted for a fraction of a second longer than the actual sight of the place––of the time––she was leaving behind. Then everything was still. That time was gone, too; the yellow, unnatural light no longer blinded her and the sound of the distant storm was replaced by the complete silence of that few moments of transit. And the ruins faded - what had once been her city, crushed beneath what had once been her best friend. "She'll have destroyed the planet within a few days."

But then––when she expected to be in her bed again, to wake up on that same morning again and have another month to try and do it right this time, to try and try and try fiercely to find the one way out of the maze she was trapped in––no, everything was wrong, it was loud and bright and smelled of a hundred strange smells and this was impossible. But all these thoughts happened so fast––Homura only had a brief second to hear a blaring, brassy honking sound behind her, to spin around and discover the front of a very old car speeding towards her, before the gears on her shield spun once more, and everything froze in place.

In the greyish light of the world sans time, everything was clearer. The old car, absolutely gargantuan to her modern Japanese sensibilities, was mere feet from where she was standing. Which was in the middle of a street, she realized. A street packed with people in odd clothing, buildings far too tall for her own town, so many of them foreigners that she must be somewhere that wasn't Japan. She took a few breaths; her heart was still pounding and her hair was still hanging into her eyes; but within a few breaths (you couldn't call them seconds, for there were no seconds when time was stopped) she was composed enough to start moving, out of the street, picking up into a light run until she got into an alleyway and ducked behind a dumpster. She let the sand flow again from her timer; time resumed. Light and color and motion all came back, as if the pause button on the remote had been hit once more, and the car that had been about to kill her braked suddenly––and seeing nothing there at all, rolled back to speed and vanished down the street. Some people were staring, but… seeing as no teenage girl had been killed, and none had dived out of the way or been pushed to safety, they must have just assumed they'd been seeing things. For they seemed to go about their business quickly enough. Homura, standing in the alley, with her partial vantage on the street, was still breathing heavily.

What was this? What was happening? Exhausted from the fight she'd just spectacularly lost - again, one more time, lost and because of that lost Madoka – and emotionally drained and suddenly feeling almost like she had whiplash purely from confusion, she couldn't come up with an explanation. Was it a witch's barrier that she'd somehow fallen into? It wasn't––whatever dying looked like, she was pretty sure it wasn't this, because she still had her soul gem (she could feel it on the back of her hand) and you didn't have near misses with car accidents in the afterlife. Had she done something wrong? Had she used her power wrong - had it taken her somewhere else instead of somewhen else? But wishes were infallible. It couldn't go wrong, could it? It just didn't…

She slumped against the wall of the alley and let her transformation go; her soul gem reverted to its form as a ring on her middle finger, and her clothing changed into the typical Mitakihara uniform; completely normal for her, of course. Her hairband was still gone, it must have broken in the fight, and her hair was a complete mess. After a moment of peering out onto the street, waiting for something to go wrong - minions to show up, things to change, any signs to reveal to her that this was no more than the work of a very elaborate, strange witch – she tried to brush her bangs to the side as best she could, and stepped out into the pedestrian flow of the street. She wasn't making a plan more than a step or two ahead yet, but she did at least have that one step: find out where the hell she was.